The line has seen a 20 percent increase in ridership in the last 10 years. The Midtown Direct Line carries at least 165,000 people each day. If you live in the suburbs of northern New Jersey, the Midtown Direct Line is the only way to travel. But they said it had improved markedly from last year, when the system was plagued by cancellations even after service was cut back and, in some places, suspended altogether.Are you thinking about taking the train? We don’t blame you. New Jersey Transit officials admit that the railroad’s reliability dropped off in May after appearing to be on the rise for a few months. From there, she planned to hop on a ferry to reach her destination near the World Trade Center.īy then, it almost surely would be past the scheduled start of her meeting. and rode it as far as Secaucus, where she had to cross over to another platform to catch a train to Hoboken. Instead, she boarded the next train at 7:27 a.m.

DeWan said as she coped with the cancellation of the 2606 she had intended to ride to a 9:15 a.m. “I would look way more stressed than this if my train was canceled on the way home,” Ms. or pay a caretaker penalty of $1 per minute, she said. She has to pick her children up by 6 p.m. He usually eats dinner (Penn Station pizza) and breakfast (a peanut butter and jelly sandwich) on the trains.Īmanda DeWan does not have that sort of leeway. Dugan said he was not usually in any hurry to get home. But the top two, Trains 35, are evening trains. The 2606 was only the third most-canceled on the Coast Line, which runs along the New Jersey Shore. Giovine, 31, and his fellow travelers on the 2606 arguably have suffered the most. And most cancellations there are caused by winter weather, he said. Metra, another large commuter railroad that serves Chicago, had only one train canceled as many as five times in the same period, said Michael Gillis, a spokesman for Metra. Neither Metro-North Railroad, which serves the suburbs north of New York, or the Long Island Rail Road canceled a train more than eight times during the first six months of the year, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Other major commuter railroads did not approach such a level of futility. The Times’s analysis found that six different trains were canceled at least 15 times from January through June. The disruption has been spread across the railroad’s 12 lines, but it has not been spread evenly.

Nj transit train map